On Wednesday, February 19, 2003, at 10:06 AM, Matthew Langford wrote:
As my experiments confirmed (earlier msg), Perl in all my installations (MacPerl, 5.6.0, 5.6.1, 5.8.0) does indeed output \f correctly.The problem may not be with Perl's \f. Print to a file, and see if \f produces 0x0C characters in the file. If it does, perl is fine.
Also, using Perl formats gave me linebreaks the last time I needed them, so this question isn't as pressing for me as it was for the OP, who sought to avoid using formats.
The problem was somewhere in the next steps down the way toward the printer: OS X, lpr, CUPS, filters, etc. When I found that lpr under darwin didn't implement some documented switches & options, that seemed like the culprit.
Matthew:
Ah.It seems you are expecting \f to be universally recognized by printer drivers, and converted to whatever the printer actually uses to end one page and start another. ... [but] you cannot expect line printer control codes in ASCII to work in a modern, multi-language, batch-printing environment.
My interest in this question lies in the need by some of my clients (such as political campaigns) for printed outputs long with the data enrichment and analysis I provide: things like mailing labels, precinct sheets, and phone lists. My practice has been to do most of my data work using Perl, and then at the end import the data into a commercial program like FileMaker for greater control than Perl formats provide over print layout and typography.
Data search and retrieval, counts, and tasks like address normalization are way easier and faster with my Perl tools than with FileMaker, Access, etc. So I'd love to handle my own output via Perl as well. Anyone care to recommend their favorite Postscript-related modules?
- Bruce
__bruce__van_allen__santa_cruz__ca__
